Archive for the 'market totalitarianism' Category
Monday, August 30th, 2010
Unseriousness is Everywhere
Under market totalitarianism, only unserious solutions to problems are eligible for consideration.
Consider the Clintonian tobacco settlement, which uses corporate tobacco money to hire corporate capitalist ad agencies to make advertisements nominally devoted to discouraging smoking, then purchases time to run those ads within commercial media.
Not only does this mean that foxes end up making the supposedly anti-fox-in-the-henhouse imagery, but the results are created with a careful eye to not upsetting the commercial media outlets in which they run.
Results? Instead of searing pictures of people being treated for and dying from lung cancer and COPD, this:
Friday, July 2nd, 2010
Adman Fired for Exhibiting Tiny Scruple
This gent here — dig the name, Orwell fans — is Alex Bogusky, ad agency ex-wonder boy (who’s 47, of course). Mr. Bogusky sold his small marketing consulting firm to a larger corporate parent agency a few years back. Now, he has been essentially fired because he holds and publicly reveals views such as these:
As we took on the BK account, we politely offered that we could not work on that part of their marketing. And in subsequent years we declined multiple invitations to work on the kids’ business. Once one of our adult spots for ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ (hard to believe, but young adults love Sponge Bob) was repurposed and re-edited by another agency to add toy footage and aired on Nick. I was livid and we got it pulled.
“It’s not a matter of the rightness or wrongness of the products being advertised. That is a grey [ed. note: note the hip Brit spelling and Mr. B's lack of said color on his equally hip mane] area. But there are children and there are adults. And the duty of adults in society is to protect its children. And that is black and white.”
Such are the institutional strictures of professional marketing. The lords of the universe tolerate no dissent, no matter how puny and peripheral.
Saturday, June 12th, 2010
The Wages of Deregulation
Back in Jimmy Carter’s days, the overclass started really demanding deregulation, a further weakening of the always pathetic regime of public inspection and limitation of business activity, and quickly got it, with a “consensus” from both major political parties that continues right to the present moment and, barring a popular uprising, beyond. The Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion is a direct consequence of this 30+ year indulgence of the core claim of capitalism, the assertion that unrestrained private profit-seeking yields the best possible results.
Turns out, the supposedly out-of-control and business-oppressing government didn’t bother to conduct half its 2008 inspections of Deepwater Horizon, and sent rookies to do some or all of the others.
The Minerals Management Service, the “regulatory” agency that not only does the “inspections” but was about to bestow its top safety award on BP the very month of the rig explosion, has one inspector for every 636 wells operating in the Gulf of Mexico.
And this is NOT just the oil industry. All “regulation,” as every e coli hamburger victim knows, is a systematic joke in this market-totalitarian nation.
It’s time for the public to step and and render the obvious verdict on this disastrous social experiment. Corporate capitalists and their purchased politicians must go. We need public, not-for-profit enterprise and real, hardcore regulation of the private enterprises we choose to tolerate.
Saturday, June 5th, 2010
Capitalist Libertarians are MoRons
So, the vile dunce Ron Paul? That vastly over-rated capitalist rube who fancies himself a libertarian while espousing a military-state immigration policy? He has another son, in addition to the one who doesn’t want the public telling businesses that racial apartheid is forbidden. This other son is called “Ronnie.”
Where did Ronnie work as an engineer before he entered retirement? The Dow Chemical Company, one of the host of conglomerates that rose to glory through Pentagon contracts during WWII; maker of napalm, Agent Orange, pesticides (including DDT), asbestos, and breast implants; post-Bhopal purchaser of Union Carbide; world’s largest producer of plastics.
Here is dear Ronnie’s statement of the Paul family’s core principle:
So, in the Pauls’ eyes, the potential thieves are of two sorts and two sorts only: tax collectors and street robbers.
I won’t comment here on the juvenile, self-defeating, heavily-sponsored equation of taxes with theft.
Rather, I’m interested in the shortness of Ron and Rand and Ronnie’s list of potential thieves.
Might there perhaps be another class of coercive, unequal exchangers out there? Perhaps the folks who not only pay you for your time while keeping for themselves the goods and services you make in the time they buy, but do so with all the perks and powers of corporate organization and size? You know, the folks who think whole oceans are their rightful gift and toilet? The ones who insist that owning stocks and bonds is a form of super-labor deserving whatever pay it gets, even if the shares came from great-grandpappy? The ones who are never rich or powerful enough? The ones who relentlessly downsize and outsource, then tell the poor to get a job?
The missing thought seems never to have entered the mind of this happy retiree from a Fortune 100 corporation…
Monday, May 24th, 2010
Even Carville Sees It
Black Reagan prefers the preservation of market fundamentalist tenets to execution of the laws and the most elementary kind of ecological concern, as David Pettit very usefully explains.
In fact, as Pettit notes, Zerobama’s now gotten so obvious and odious that it’s started to bother even the professional trickster James Carville, who correctly observes that Obummer is “risking everything” to keep the capitalists happy:
I think they actually believe that BP has some kind of a good motivation here.’ They’re naive! BP is trying to save money, save everything they can… They won’t tell us anything, and oddly enough, the government seems to be going along with it!
The 2008 Marketer of the Year would have to get massively better just to rise up to Epic Fail status. As it stands, he’s every bit as destructive as was his immediate predecessor.
Sunday, May 16th, 2010
Tort Abortion
Guess what, kids? That’s right: Our laws were written to relieve corporate capitalists from paying for the true damages they cause.
Section 1004 of the Oil Pollution Act, passed by our lovely Congresspeople in 1990 as a strengthening of then-existing rules reads as follows:
That means that, by law, British Petroleum is not only able to enjoy all the rights of the “fictitious individual” while not risking actual individuals’ bodily punishment exposures, but the maximum it can be required to pay for the ongoing Deepwater Horizon eco-tastrophe is $75 million — less than 5% of its 2009 reported net income; 0.3% of its total assets. As a financial punishment, this is a traffic ticket, literally.
And the official response of the liberal stylists among our allegedly concerned corporate politicians? To eliminate the cap on such damages and force giant for-profit operators to face the risk of being liable, like you and me and everybody else who can’t afford a legal dream team, for what they actually do?
Nope. Of course not. Not on the table.
